Profit Driven Maintenance For Physical Assets

In the board rooms of most companies the word maintenance typically gives the top management an uneasy feeling. Why is this the case? The main reason is the way in which they think about business. They generally think, speak and discuss about opportunities, profits, risks, new markets, added value and costs for their business. On the other hand, the maintenance manager generally thinks in terms of techniques, failures, technical problems, workforce schemes, and not purely in costs and benefits. Maintenance costs are seen as penalties from ‘above’ and maintenance as a function is not viewed as a business opportunity for improvements and for creating added value. The main scope of this book is to fill this large gap between these two worlds. We will treat the maintenance function as a pure business-driven process to fulfil the company’s main goals and address the challenge of organizing the maintenance activities in the most profitable way for the asset owner. There are a lot of methods available for maintenance management improvement like Asset Management, TPM, RCM, WCM, FMECA, Lean, PAS 55, etc. Profit-Driven Maintenance for Physical Assets provides the reader with an overview of how all these methods can improve the maintenance function and how to leverage the opportunity to utilize them. In addition, the maintenance organization and the competencies of the people involved are important items in this book. For maintenance managers output improvement and operational excellence are high on the agenda. It is important that the maintenance function not only covers technical matters about the physical assets, but that there is also a thorough understanding of the business way of thinking about assets. We can call this ‘Technomics’. This approach enables communication with top management to take place on the basis of business terms, such as profit, added value and profitability.